Storymaking in sustainable energy
systems research
Professor Karen Henwood(Social Sciences, Cardiff, UK)
Storymaking Symposium, Liverpool Screen School, Liverpool, 11 November 2016
Making knowledge through stories:
social science & the arts
• Traditional division of labour: researchers produce knowledge, arts helps communicate it
• Alternative model: arts practitioners & researchers as knowledge intermediaries
Peat Leith and Frank Vanclay (2015) “Translating science to benefit diverse publics:
engagement pathways for linking climate risk, uncertainty and agricultural identities”.
Science Technology and Human Values (40(6) 939-964
The value of storymaking for research:
three projects
• Making Sense of Sustainability – Environmental Futures Dialogue (AHRC Connected Communities, 2013-14 - an arts-social science network)
• Energy Biographies (ESRC/EPSRC 2011-16) (www.energybiographies.org)
• Flexis (Wales European Funding Office Structural Funds – WEFO, 2015-2020)
Obliquity and creating data
• Environmental Futures Dialogue project – how to talk about big, difficult issues like sustainability?
• Worked with arts colleagues to create spaces, situations and objects to think with (Heim, 2004)
• The importance of ‘cultural probes’ -using material objects and obliquely-related tasks
• Convivial spaces alive to the unexpected
• Sought to inspire stories, enhancing data elicitation
Examples of cultural probes
Energy Biographies study (EBs)…
• Energy policy and research all about making stories –stories of big and small transitions
• EBs approach: asks ‘can biographical stories tell us about the complexities of change?’ & makes visible the intangibility of energy usage in everyday life?
• 3 waves of multimodal engagement with participants over one year (2012-3)
▫ Participant photography of everyday energy use
▫ Viewing films of energy futures and the everyday
http://energybiographies.org/energy-stories-gallery/
Obliquity - multimodality
Cos we love being outside, we just love
that you can you know go, we were sitting
out there one evening … it was like
midnight and you could have a drink
outside still and it’s so lovely here cos it’s
so quiet and everything so but you
wouldn’t have been able to do it without
that so or you would have been freezing.
So that’s our kind of, we know it’s really
bad but we’re still going to use it. (Lucy)
Obliquity - multimodalityDefinitely no way I would have a car in fifteen years … I
don’t foresee the car playing anything but a tiny part of my
life. No more building … perhaps just a bit of kind of
maintenance you know… I mean I suspect that there will still
be a degree of kind of internet communication and computer
work but I’m not clear on quite what form that would take …
I mean in fifteen years I expect that you know this will be a
huge kind of ecovillage … with all the elements necessary
for self-reliance completely established and up and running
so you know a good bakery, a good pub scene, you know
good social networks going on, really diverse production
covering just about everything you could want, yeah. (Peter)
Obliquity - multimodality
I mean I’m fascinated by all this, these interviews act like a mirror you know
and so I think that my reaction to the indoor garden was because it was still
linked to life, to green things, a connection to the biological reality of being a
human being. Whereas I thought the IT leisure stuff depicted in those, in that
home I think its dehumanising and it takes human beings away from nature …
but I’ve lived long enough to understand that you know the bell curve of
human behaviour is such that there’s always going to be some people who
would happily, totally immerse themselves in a non-biological totally
technological world and be very happy and fair enough. I suppose in the
future there will still be people who renounce all the technology even though
it’s available … So like I think that that is a pretty neat illustration of the, the
future it’ll be this kind of mishmash of and where the technology is hidden
people like me can pretend that they’re living in a natural state but in reality
the technology will be there. (Jonathan)
Energy Biographies are stories of change
A Sense of
Energy(Hackney Wick/The
Senedd, Cardiff Bay,
June & October 2014)
Re-using the exhibits• ‘Monster Confidence’ event aimed at encouraging young women
into STEM organised by Stemettes
Photos courtesy of Stemettes
Flexis (Flexible,
Integrated Energy
Systems)
• Engineering-social science research consortium in Wales
• Demonstrator sites in Port Talbot, centring on Tata Steel, and surrounding region
• Revisiting “stories of change” to understand potential social impacts of energy system transitions
• Socio-technical focus – expert imaginaries and effects of interventions in everyday homes, plus siting/risk controversies
Flexis & obliquity
• Planning range of multimodal storymakingresearch strategies
• First example: expert interviews
• Eliciting personal as well as professional perspectives on the future
Final remarks: storymaking & questions for
social science & the arts
1. How to bring together social science & arts to stage ‘convivial’ research encounters to create knowledge?
2. Can their collaborative work be developed to enliven engagement with research?
3. What role does obliquity play in making it possible to tell ‘difficult’ stories?
4. How can the arts bring materiality into social science, making tangible the intangible (e.g. everyday life and its dependencies, assumptions about the future?)
To read end of award report:
• http://energybiographies.org/newsblog/energy-biographies-final-report-available/
EB’s design and methodology …
• Shirani, F., Parkhill, K., Butler, C., Groves, C., Pidgeon, N. and Henwood, K. (2016) Asking about the future: Methodological insights from energy biographies, International Journal of Social Research Methodologies, .19 (4) 429-444 DOI: 10.1080/13645579.2015.1029208
• Henwood, K., Shirani, F. and Groves, C.(in press). Using photographs in interviews: When we lack the words to say what practice means. To appear in U. Flick (ed) The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Data Collection London: Sage
Thank you for listeningContact: [email protected]
Flexis Social Sciences, Research Team
Dr Chris Groves
Dr Fiona Shirani
Professor Nick Pidgeon
